Brain institute receives over § 7 Million for research on Free will

13 March, 2019

The newly-minted Institute for Interdisciplinary Brain and Behavioral Science (The Brain Institute) at Chapman University, with Dr. Uri Maoz as project leader, is the recipient of a total of $7.04 million to study how the human brain enables conscious control of decisions and actions. The John Templeton Foundation funded $5.34 million; the Fetzer Institute funded $1.55 million; and the remaining $150,000 comes from the Fetzer Memorial Trust. This is Chapman’s largest non-federal research grant to date. With the Chapman Brain Institute serving as the central hub, this grant supports research efforts at 17 universities spanning four continents: including Charité Berlin (Germany), Dartmouth, Duke, Florida State University, Harvard, Indiana UniversityBloomington, NIH, Monash University (Australia), NYU, The Sigtuna Foundation (Sweden), Tel Aviv University (Israel), University College London (UK), University of Edinburgh (UK), UCLA, and Yale.

Alf Linderman, Associate professor of religious sociology and executive director at the Sigtuna Foundation and Hans Liljenström Professor of Biometrics and leader of the research center Agora for Biosystems will participate in the international research conference Neuroscience and Free Will March 14 -18 at the Chapman University Brain Institute, a continuation of the conference held at the Sigtuna Foundation in June 2017.

– Hans Liljenström will present a model on how cognition, feeling and intention affect conscious decisions when we also take into account the social dimension. The idea that we have a free will is complex and there is every reason to problematize it both from a scientific, philosophical and religious perspective, says Alf Linderman